I've decided to start a new series of articles on how I solve various problems in my daily programmer lifee. Usually a problem has a distinct message box that shows up which you can copy the text of with the CTRL + C key combination. I think that a lot of people search directly for this text, and it woudl be awesome to have it solved. Maybe I'll even start a website some day to host these solutions so that people (or in a perfect world the vendor...) can post a solution to them. For today, here's my problem that I experienced inside of devenv.exe (Visual Studio 2008) today while trying to use the Server Explorer to add a new Data Connection.
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Server Explorer
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Unable to add data connection.
Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Sdk.Sfc, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
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OK
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I was tipped off by this forum post http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.vstudio.general&tid=89ee0e86-b8fc-40a7-a0e1-51ac4033302e&cat=en_US_38f7e3d1-40bd-4daf-941f-f45d2ff6ff9b&lang=en&cr=US&sloc=&p=1
to install the SQL Server 2008 Managment Objects and Native Client, which you can get from here
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C6C3E9EF-BA29-4A43-8D69-A2BED18FE73C&displaylang=en#filelist
Or more specifically, here
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Management Objects X86 Package http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123708&clcid=0x409
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Native Client X86 Package http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123717&clcid=0x409